Jean-Marc has been working for weeks to create a wine label for his vintage debut--make that for his first vintage! When I saw the initial prototype (and the bright and hopeful look on my husband's face) I held my tongue, remembering the old adage "Si tu n'as rien de gentil à dire, ne dis rien."*

All right. Give him this one, I reasoned. Next year, I reassured myself, we'd change labels! After all, the etiquettes* would change yearly--with each year a new work of art.... I already had several artists in mind: we might use my mom's "l'Homme Qui Crache" (The Spitting Man) or my Grandma Audrey's"Cabanon dans les Vignes".* Then there's my daughter's "Hivebound Abeilles"* or my son's "Sarment Sous La Lune."* There. I'd thought up the next four labels! Not that I'd gotten around to a producing a prototype...as Jean-Marc had.

"Mais non, chérie*....the artwork is lovely but it won't be possible to use them all." Harrumph! My husband is remembering another adage (about a kind word turning away colère.)* As for wrath, my face must have resembled The Spitting Man's for Jean-Marc quickly elaborated:

"Chérie...The étiquettes don't change with every harvest. The wine label, like the name, is a brand." Oh, branding. OK. I understand now. But, oh, with just one chance to get the label right...we will need all the help we can get! For this reason I am issuing the following statement or appel*...

*A CALL FOR HELP!*Two ways that you, the reader, might help with the design of our wine label: 1. by voting on the current prototypes (see poll, below) 2. by submitting your own prototype (you design the wine label!)click this link for guidelines

In the meantime...back to the drawing board...yours.... and ours! My wish is to post reader "label art" so that all of us can review the possibilities. Then we can vote again on October 1st--when the entries will be posted online, side by side, along with the original prototypes. Please tell your grandmother, son,friends, art class...anyone who might enjoy participating! In the meantime, don't forget to vote!

When Jean-Marc asked if I had an idea for a name, I blurted out the first thing that popped into my head: "Rouge-Bleu!"*

"C'est parfait!"* said he."But...I wasn't serious! I mean...the name is taken!""It's perfect, chérie.* It is just what I was looking for! It's settled. We'll call the vineyard 'Rouge-Bleu'!"

Oh, I had my doubts. Once those passed, I had my druthers. After all, I could choose NOT to share the name!

Sharing...it is something I am still learning to do in this marriage: from those canettes* of beer back when we first met...to today's bathwater: "Don't throw it out!" Jean-Marc still protests. I realize that the French are conservationists, but most don't slosh through mud and grapes all day long. It's enough to clog the plumbing! We've since come to a compromise: I take my bath first....

In five years' time, that will surely be one story I will regret having told you. But I can be as bumbling now as I was twenty-five years ago, when I met the original Rouge-Bleu with whom I share this name...and this story.

This name-swapping took place over a well-stocked cosmetics counter where my best friend* (all but 15-years-old at the time) worked after school and on weekends. I used to visit her there at the mall while on my way to my own after school job (hostessing at Coco's diner).

My best friend, with strawberry blond hair to her waist, wore one of those department store frocks. Pinned to the lapel was a gold name tag on which her real name was engraved: "Susan". I might have called her "Suzette"... After all, she did represent a famous French company, this, as the youngest cosmetic clerk in Arizona.

There, at Paradise Valley Mall, we glammed up. "Rouge-Bleu!" Susan said, announcing the color while twisting open yet another tube of rouge à lèvres.* We were fifteen going on forty, best friends trying on wrinkle cream and red lipstick. Our skin was caked after so much preening and powdering. Like cake,and on hearing the words "Rouge-Bleu," our colorful faces brightened as if lit by birthday candles.

"Rouge-Bleu!" We may not have known the correct pronunciation, but the words played on our painted lips like a premonition. The French words written on that tube of lipstick represented our very raison d'être*: to one day be European! From that moment on, we buried our given names and took up the Rouge-Bleu sobriquet, if only en privé.* We were no longer "Susan" or "Kristi" but united, not by fingers, pricked and bloody, but by the same sanguine color: Rouge-Bleu!

Now we are truly going on forty, no longer fifteen. We wear much less make-up, a little more wrinkle cream, and we're still sharing the same sobriquet. Rouge-Bleu eventually sold enough lipstick to move to Germany and back. The other Rouge-Bleu quit hostessing (hightailing it to France, first chance shegot).

As for the nickname "Rouge-Bleu," which stuck as the lipstick once had, I've decided to share it with Jean-Marc for use on his wine label. Make that "we" have decided: the decision was instant for Susan, who has never had a problem with giving, but has a natural "what's mine is yours" attitude. From the moment she heard the news, she expressed a brand new raison d'être: to share her time and energy by helping out with the first harvest. That's so like her.

.PS: My best friend, like my husband, is a conservationist; difference is, she knows when to throw sharing out with the bathwater!

* * *This story is for Susan, the original Rouge-Bleu, for reminding me to give without hesitation--and as often as the chance arises.

A stranger camped out in our driveway over the weekend. I had offered him the couch, but Jean-Marc insisted that the man, who went by "Vincent,"* would be fine in the fourgon.* Jean-Marc's brother, Jacques, who has been sleeping on the living room floor since June (when not putting up walls in our home), seconded that. "He has all he needs," my brother-in-law assured me, of the moonlighter who had agreed to plaster our walls.

Vincent, I learn, works non-stop, seven days a week. At night, he passes out in his van, the metal floor of which is as soft as a feather mattress when you're dead tired. Jacques says that Vincent is highly in demand being the best plasterer west of Saint Tropez (where the two met on a construction site. My brother-in-law was in charge of putting up plasterboard).

* * *On Saturday morning I looked out the kitchen window and noticed a sheet of gold covering the field of vines beyond. The sun was up and, it appeared, so was Vincent. I watched him fiddle with the garden hose. "Il fait sa toilette," he is grooming, my brother-in-law explained. Hadn't anyone told our poor guest that he was welcome to use the indoor shower?

"He isn't a guest," Jean-Marc corrected, putting the matter straight, adding that I was not to worry about meals, either. The previous night, while stirring a pot of plain pasta, I had wished for something more to offer our non-guest. But after weeks of juggling menus and feeding live-in laborers lunch and dinner, I was out of ideas and food.

Back at the kitchen window, or rather--hidden behind a corner of it, I looked out to the front yard. There, beneath the mulberry tree, I noticed a plastic bucket full of water. Shirtless, with a rag and a scrap of soap, the moonlighter washed his face, running the cloth across his neck to work out any kinks that a corrugated metal floor might put there after a long night. He scrubbed any traces of plaster from his cuticles. "It gets into everything!" he had said the night before. That's when I had noticed his droopy eyes, the bags beneath them added years to his would-be youthful visage:* still, he couldn't be more than thirty-five years old.

"Le pauvre!* He works too hard and he doesn't have much!" I had noticed a sack of sliced bread on the front seat of his van. That must have been his breakfast! I finished making the coffee and went to get the sucrier* only to learn that we were out of sugar cubes.

* * *It's Monday morning now and I am making another pot of coffee. I smile into the sugar bowl, which is no longer empty thanks to an unlikely "loaner" who has since moved on. I pick out the plaster among the sweet crystals and think about "le pauvre". I had thought he didn't have much; in the end it was I who was lacking.

Lorsque les gens choisissent de s'assimiler, on peut parler de...creuset...s'ils sont contraints de le faire on parle de...autocuiseur. When people choose to assimilate, we can talk about a...melting pot...if they are forced to do so, we talk about a...pressure cooker....

Of all the creuset* definitions* that I have combed through, in English and in French, this one struck me the most:

"A place or set of circumstances where people or things are subjected to forces that test them and often make them change."

The idea of change or "emotional growth" inherent in such testing circumstances motivates me and I find my mood lifting. That is, until I read this next definition:

"a severe trial or ordeal"...

OK. Admit it. Life isn't always hunky-dory here in a fractured French farmhouse where we are still tripping over cords, shimmying past scaffolding, and trying to ignore walls and floors that forever have holes in them as if chilly fall is NOT just around the corner. Thankfully, I am not here today to talk about trials and tribulations. Let's talk about tomatoes!

Mr. Delhome's tomatoes, of course, which don't sweat like squash or cry like courgettes* (in other words: no need to sprinkle salt over them before sopping up the excess liquid with a paper towel, all the better for frying them). No, all Mr. Delhome's tomatoes need are thunder and lightning. (Well, maybe nottonnerre,* but they do need fire!)

"So," I say to monsieur, verifying that I've understood his recipe for tomates provençales.* "I'm to put those tomatoes in a casserole, having halved them, add a filet* of olive oil, a sprinkle of salt, pepper, and persil*... then throw them into the oven?"Monsieur looks dubious."I mean...I'm to PUT them into the oven...?"Monsieur maintains a doubtful expression."Rather, I'll put them... on the stovetop? N'est-ce pas?"

After a good long Provençale pause, the corners of monsieur's mouth lift. That mischievous grin is back."Nah!" he answers. His eyes begin to search the scrap yard that is our future front lawn.

"You take a few of those stones, there..." he begins. Next, he looks over to the pile of scrap wood. "Un peu de bois..."* Then, seeing the pile of recyclable metal, he adds "...un lit de fer..."*

I gather I am to lay the iron "grill" across a circle of stones.... I get what he's hinting at. I've seen the fire pit that he's dug or "creusé" (kreuh-zay) on his own property. While the idea of cooking over a feu* appeals to me, I'm in no mood to rough it; not even with a recipe. We may live on a construction sitebut, this side of summer and a swirl of fall in the air, I'll be damned if we're going to start camping out!

* * *

A suggestion from Monsieur Delhome: when the tomatoes are finished (some 40 minutes into baking) crack a few eggs into the piping hot Creuset (or similar type casserole), sizzle and serve. A little pinard,* according to monsieur, and the meal washes down nicely.

PS: Parmesan, chapelure,* and even herbes de Provence (in place of parsley) make good toppers for the tomatoes, too!

Some French culinary advice for you today: Don't sweat it. Sweat the vegetables! I know this is what my mother-in-law would do. She knows everything about cooking and could separate an egg with her eyes closed. Make that one eye closed. Now imagine that very eye looking down the ridge of a great Gallic nose, or "pif". That is how my belle-mère* cooks: "Au pif" ("by the nose" or "by guesswork").

When our neighbor offered me that home-grown zucchini (as heavy as a magnum and about as big) he suggested I make a gratin de courgette.*

"Zucchini casserole"? I imagine the words coming out of a neatly painted mouth... Delivered as they were from our neighbor's chapped and wrinkled lips, the lines now erased after nine decades of wear, I couldn't help but wonder how a male of his generation knew anything about home economics. Not that a female from my own generation knows gazillions more about the subject. I made an emergency call to Marseilles.

"Allo?" my mother-in-law answered. I trusted she will be able to help. My belle-mère will stop whatever she is doing (whether that be watching her favorite show--Desperate Housewives--or taking her quotidian nap) to listen.

This desperate housewife's ear is now glued to the phone; on the table before me, a bill from France Telecom doubles as a scratch pad."Alors, chérie, il faut faire des rondelles..."* My belle-mère instructs me to divide up the zucchini into slices."N'oublie pas de les dégorger..." Don't forget to sweat the slices...."...et les mettre dans un plat..." ...and to put them into a (baking) dish."...et faire des couches." ... and to make layers...

My belle-mère tells me that, between layers, I might add gruyère rapé,* chopped garlic, and a bit of grated muscade.* I forget the muscade and add the bits of ham leftover from yesterday's assiette de charcuterie.* There are a few day-old slices of tomato that need to be used; in they go.... I top each layer with a swirl of olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, pepper, and the herbs (sarriette,* thyme, and rosemary) that Aunt Marie-Françoise has collected near the village of Fuveau.

When the layers are quits with the edge of the casserole dish, I crack three eggs into a bowl, add a bit of water, more herbes de Provence,* salt, and pepper, and beat the mixture together before pouring it over the top. I flip the pouch of grated cheese over, shaking it across the dish, so as to leave no stone (or scrap) unturned.

I hesitate to use the gas oven as there are only two temperatures: high heat and low heat. The oven is on loan from my brother-in-law (who, in turn, has borrowed it from Uncle Yannick. My French family borrows appliances as one might borrow a cup of sugar; indeed, what is not bolted down is borrowable).

I decide to not worry about oven temperature and cook the courgettes "au pif." Not forty-five minutes later, I peer into Uncle Yannick's four* and see the golden croûte* of a gorgeously scented squash. My mother-in-law's final instructions come back to me as I pull the savory dish from the oven. I'll share them with you now, as I have her recipe: